Is Case Finally Closed on 1965 Pennsylvania 'UFO Mystery'?

Mockup of the Kecksburg UFO made for the Unsolved Mysteries TV program in 1990. The object is displayed at the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department in Pennsylvania.

Credit: Stan Gordon

In the
chronicles of UFO oddness, there?s been a long-standing oddity ? some say
folklore, others deem it reality. This saga, now over four decades old, centers
on a reported out-of-the-sky incident involving the small town of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.

The date is
Dec. 9, 1965: Residents see a ball of fire shooting through the darkening
evening sky and then, seemingly, the object ? purportedly shaped like a jumbo-sized
acorn after impact ? makes some sort of controlled crash into the woods.
From there, the strangeness factor escalates with purported military personnel
isolating the area from curious onlookers and toting something out of the locale
on a flatbed truck.

Whatever
took place in Kecksburg, a dutiful look into the episode escalated to a lawsuit
against NASA for access to information on the incident.

A central
figure in the weirdness is New York-based investigative journalist, Leslie
Kean. Working with the Coalition for Freedom of Information, she was on the receiving
end of loads of documents ? an outcome of winning the lawsuit.

This stage
of the saga began in 2002, when Kean was asked to spearhead a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) initiative sponsored by the Sci Fi Channel ? an effort
to acquire government documents on the Kecksburg case. The following year, she
ended up as the plaintiff in a federal, FOIA lawsuit filed against NASA in Washington, DC.

?After
previously promising to conduct an expedited search for files related to the
1965 Kecksburg UFO crash case, NASA had stonewalled and was withholding
documents, leaving no recourse but this one,? Kean explained in a just-issued
report. ?A settlement four years later, in October 2007, required NASA to
provide hundreds of new documents and pay my attorney?s legal fees.? ?

No
smoking gun

NASA?s
resulting search, monitored by the court, was completed in August 2009. The
outcome of the investigation is available in Kean?s paper, which was posted
online this month to the coalition?s Web site.

The report,
flatly titled, ?The Conclusion of the NASA Lawsuit - Concerning the Kecksburg,
PA UFO case of 1965,? explains how the process worked and the results of the
search after the 2007 settlement in federal court.

The bottom
line: No smoking gun documents were released, Kean notes, but many provocative
questions and unresolved contradictions were raised by what was received, as
well as by the fact that many files were missing or destroyed.

One open-ended
aspect of Kean?s reportage is the role of ?Project Moondust? ? a U.S. government-run activity involved in examining non-U.S. space objects, or objects of unknown origin. Indeed, various
State Department documents show that NASA played a role in the recovery and
examination of space object debris.

Cold
trail, hot caveats

After
months of studying the material received, Kean reports that the trail is cold ?
but with caveats.

?I am
convinced that something came down and landed in Kecksburg,? Kean told SPACE.com.

Kean thinks
that a UFO connection of the extra-Earth type ?is a possibility that has to be
considered. It can?t be ruled out,? she said.

Other
potentials, Kean added, ?include a very secret U.S. project or another nation?s
hardware. But both of these explanations are unlikely.?

Kean?s
research indicates that it appears doubtful that the object in question was
either Russian or from any other country on our planet ? backed up by NASA
orbital debris elucidation. Also, data from the U.S. Space Command and the
Russian Space Agency fortifies the fact that whatever came down that day was not
a Russian satellite or space probe, she stated.

?So I would
rule that out, and say it?s either a UFO or a secret American device of some
sort,? Kean said. ?If it was our own,? she added, ?why couldn?t they tell us
about this 40 years later??

Therefore, that?s
why the UFO possibility ?has to be kept in the running, as hard as it may be to
accept,? Kean said. ?Possibly it was some kind of secretive U.S. government project?or program?or the testing of something. Maybe it was highly
radioactive so they don?t want anybody to know about it.?

However, a
central take home message from Kean has no connection with alien visitation ?
more a governmental encounter of the lack-of-transparency kind.

The effort
highlights the problems inherent to the use of the Freedom of Information Act
in our democracy, Kean explained.

?It has
been a long, long process,? she said. ?The important thing about this has
nothing to do with UFOs. It
just points out the problems with the Freedom of Information Act as it stands
today.?

A case
worth investigating

The NASA
lawsuit was made possible because of the support of a major television network,
Kean said. Also add to the investigation, John Podesta -- President Clinton?s
former Chief of Staff -- an archival research group, a lawyer, and a public
relations firm in Washington, D.C.

Larry Landsman, then Director of
Special Projects at the Sci Fi Channel (now Syfy), launched the UFO advocacy
initiative, with the Kecksburg lawsuit as one component of that larger undertaking.
He is now an independent television producer working on various specials
and miniseries.

?In early 2002, a group of us began
to seriously explore what initiative could be launched that would be
appropriate to the spirit of the network,? Landsman told SPACE.com. ?After much
brainstorming, I proposed a campaign that pushed for the truth behind all
of the many reports of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. We were the
first -- and so far, only -- company ever to pursue such an initiative and we attacked
the issue on a number of fronts both on air and off air,? he said.

As for Kecksburg, Landsman
continued, ?we felt it was a case worth investigating,? supporting Kean?s
Freedom of Information pursuit of the full and uncensored reports about the incident.

?There were too many lives that were
upended from this event and American citizens had -- and have -- the
right to know the truth. Clearly many things are going on in our world
that cannot be easily explained,? Landsman said. ?Polls show that a majority of
Americans believe the government is covering up information on UFOs. The
truth should not be kept in the hands of only a relative few at various
government agencies and military departments.?

Keep an open mind

For Stan
Gordon, a steadfast on-scene investigator of what took place in Kecksburg those
many years ago, the case is far from closed.

?My
feelings today in regards to the Kecksburg incident are unchanged. I remain
convinced that an object of still undetermined origin fell from the sky into a
wooded area near Kecksburg,? said Gordon.

Gordon told SPACE.com that multiple independent witnesses
described the object traversing the sky. As it turned and neared Kecksburg,
the object was described as moving and descending slowly, as if making a controlled
landing.

?The
semi-buried metallic acorn shaped object was observed on the ground by a number
of independent eyewitnesses. Whatever that object was, it was important enough
for the military to quickly arrive on the scene and recover the object in question,?
Gordon said.

One plausible theory, Gordon suggested, is that the object was an advanced
secretive human-made space device with re-entry control capabilities which
apparently failed. Another is that this could have been
an extra-terrestrial spacecraft, he noted.

?Until
definitive evidence is found that will conclusively explain the object, I will
continue to keep an open mind concerning all theories as to the origin of the
object,? Gordon concluded.

For Kean,
even after years of work trying to unravel the Kecksburg incident, ?what took
place there is an unanswered question.?

Leonard
David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He
is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space
World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.